25 July 2010

joined in studio by guest seumas milne, associate editor, guardian uk newspaper to discuss his recent column in which he said that the afghan war exposed the weakness of america's global power.

on the phone is colin butfield, head of campaigns at the world wildlife fund to talk about the lasting damage to wildlife from the deepwater horizon oil catastrophe.

mr. butfield points out that "oil is, of course, a naturally occurring substance, it will breakdown over time -- the key question is what happens to it between now and the point that it does breakdown and it will be different in the deep-water environment and to it washing up on shore."

"i think that you have to fall into two categories: one is the immediate on the ground stuff that they can do in terms of both the clearing up and stopping of the oil that's immediately there. as well as paying for regeneration on the ground of areas of wetlands and things like that.

but you're right in saying that some of [the environment] just wont recover, obviously a dolphin cant sue. so one of the things that we're particularly concerned about is the impact on bp and on the other oil companies future operations. obviously this is only one of their deep-sea offshore drilling operations and there's numerous others and numerous plans to have several more including up in the arctic which is a far more difficult environment to contain an oil spill -- far less infrastructure than there is in the gulf of mexico -- a far more difficult sea -- far worse environmental conditions in terms of the impact.

and we'd like to see far greater restrictions placed upon the drilling that companies like bp can do both in terms of the immediate on the ground impact but also in terms of moving away from our oil dependency and using this as a catalyst to start to direct things towards lower carbon, less risky both in terms of environmental and financial impact sources of generating energy." colin butfield, wwf. emphasis added.